FROZEN GRAVITY WATER SUPPLY

[Toepopper]

For the second winter in a row we have had unusually cold temperatures in this geographic area of our country, with night time temps plunging down into the low twenties. The water pipes from the holding tank are frozen solid and several brass ball valves have split open from ice expansion. The water inside our holding tanks has ice in it but they have not frozen completely solid. Fortunately I had stored 4, five gallon plastic buckets of water to use for flushing the toilet. Up on the mountainside I have a small 550 gallon water storage tank which I had drained back in October, after fire season ended. So now I pump water from a pond up to this empty tank and we are using this to supply water to the house. This adds a lot of extra work as every morning I have to walk down to the pond and flip the switch on the solar water pump to start pumping, then hike up the mountainside to make sure the water is getting to the tank and also to open the valve to the house. Then in the afternoon I go back to the pond and turn the pumps off and drain the input pipe so it won't freez overnight. Then hike back up to the tank and drain it too. During the day we shower, do the laundry etc while the water is flowing before I turn it off for the night. This is a real pain in the buttocks, but fortunately it has warmed up enough to melt the frozen pipes and get back to a normal routine with 24 hours a day water supply.

[dejure]

Any insulation would seem fair game. Sticks of foam run a dollar each or so. This wrapped with tin foil, shinny side in, woulds seem to go a long way to solving your problem. When our ten food deep cattle tank fill valve froze, in the fifty below, I had to stick my arm in the nearly frozen water to thaw the pipe. After that, I wrapped it and didn't have anymore problem.

[whitewolf]

We had a cottage on a lake in Ohio at one point, Got it for a song and a dance because it had no ( N O ) plumbing.

The reason there was no plumbing in the house, and we got a deal was because it was totally impractical to drill a well there water wsa basically unobtainable by drilling it was over 300 feet deep and was bad water anyway...

when we moved in one bedroom had probably 50 plastic jugs that were used for drinking water by the elderly lady that lived there before us.

One night while laying awake Thinking and Praying in the quiet our first year there, trying to figure out how I could obtain water for my famly,

I think it was the Prayer part that worked... it dawned on me that I had every thing I needed, there was an old coal bin , not used any more right under the kitchen, approx 9 ft by 9 ft.m , turned out to be about 1000 gallons and we just had met a pool designer at our chuch, who later made a custom liner for our coal bin and it became a cistern, located right under our kitchen , if there were no electric, we could even use a pitur pump .... (Woke my wife up so I wouldnt be the only one who was amazed)

We painted the rafters under the kitchen with a type of pool paint and never had any moistur damage or anything, used a toilet bowl float on the end of a 1x 4 on a door hinge, to trigger a contact to let us know when my daughter was wasting too much water.....

Whitewolf...